June's recommendation: His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire in the UK), by Naomi Novik.
I'm well and truly behind the bandwagon on this one, but oh well.
This book (and its following series) can be put into a nutshell with satisfying ease: it's the Napoleonic wars, but both sides have air corps of dragons. Especially given that many of the dragons are large enough to be manned by small crews, rather than single riders, it ends up feeling a lot like Patrick O'Brian in mid-air.
The inciting incident of the plot is that a British warship captures a French prize whose hold contains a dragon egg near hatching. The way Novik has set it up, a dragon must be persuaded to accept a harness immediately after hatching, or it will go feral and never answer to human commands. (It's easy to see an echo of Anne McCaffrey, though Novik successfully avoids making her setup into a Pern clone.) Upon cracking its shell, the dragon ignores the poor fellow who draws the short straw for this duty, but strikes up a conversation with the ship's captain, Will Laurence, who sacrifices his own future to keep this dragon from going unharnessed. Aviators, it seems, are not exactly welcomed in respectable society, though they provide a critical component of Britain's defense. And once a man gets a dragon to accept a harness, they're together for life; there's no backing out.
This first book is very much an introduction to the world and its quirks. There are different breeds of dragon, with different capabilities; one of my favorite touches is an encounter with an endearingly brainless courier dragon -- he can fly at high speed for fourteen hours without dropping, but he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Because Laurence is coming in from the outside, rather than being raised to the aviator service from childhood the way most of them are, we get to learn about dragon training and handling in a graceful manner. And there are some elements I find particularly interesting, like the arrangements made for dragons with longer lifespans than humans; certain aviators specifically raise up children to inherit their dragons when they die.
There's definitely a worthwhile plot that gets resolved in this first novel, but it's also fairly clearly a setup for the ongoing series. I've only read one more so far (Throne of Jade; Black Powder War is on my shelves awaiting my free time, and there's at least one more to come), so I'm specifically making this recommendation for the first book only, but the series promises to be an interesting exploration of the world beyond Britain and France; dragon breeds differ in other lands, as do the way they are treated, and there's a wealth of potential plots in that. The second book takes you to China, and the third appears to involve the Middle East.
So, in short, Patrick O'Brian + Anne McCaffrey, with a deft touch for the sensibilities of the period. I'm looking forward to reading more.